Disguised Affections

A/N: Thank you, my dears, for granting me a guilt-free day off yesterday. The horses are splendid, the husband is lovely, the dinner was romantic. The husband (a Remus Lupin type) bought me calla lilies, and took me to a wonderful dinner at a restaurant/wine bar called Domaine Hudson. (It’s domainehudson dot com if you want to check it out!) They specialize in wonderful, but obscure wines and create their menus in order to complement the wines, not vice versa. It was LOVELY.

I hope you like this chapter. It’s a very important one, and I was thoroughly engaged when I was writing it.

Please drop me a review and let me know what you think!

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Chapter Fourteen

The child’s eyes were a cornflower blue. ‘So beautiful,’ he thought. She couldn’t have been more than four years old by his best guess. Her thumb was tucked in her mouth, and the man thought that he should remove it so her teeth didn’t grow in crooked. He ran his hand over her downy blonde head and smiled at her sadly.

‘Gods, it’s so sad about her parents. Leaving such a little poppet to fend for herself.’

He sat next to her, and pulled the covers up to her chin. There was a ratty stuffed toy bear on the floor next to her bed, and the man picked it up and brushed it off. He smiled at it. The fur was grey and dingy and half loved off, and one ear showed definite signs of sucking. ‘Disgusting,’ he thought. An eye was dangling by a thread and he cast a quick nonverbal Reparo on it.

She smiled as he gave it to her.

Con rolled suddenly onto his side.

Footsteps in the hallway. His stomach clenched. ‘No, no, no, no,’ he thought. ‘Not this one.’ A solemn-eyed man with dark brown hair came into the child’s room.

“What are you doing?” The solemn-eyed man's voice was surprising calm.

He raised a shoulder.

“You can’t save her.”

He turned away and smiled at the child, picking up one of her hands. “Look at how small her hands are compared to mine,” he showed the solemn-eyed stranger.

“You’re going to get yourself killed if you keep carrying on this way in every bloody house we do.”

“I know, ‘Dolph.”

“I can’t protect you forever.”

“I know, ‘Dolph.”

“I won’t, mate. This is it. The last time.” The solemn-eyed man cocked his head. “It tears your soul, kills a part of you. That’s why it gets easier every time you do it. It’s an act of violence, but for this little baby, it’d be an act of mercy. Walden’s downstairs.”

Con groaned and a tear seeped from under his closed eyelid.

“Your choices are either do it quickly and painlessly, or leave it for the monster. Any other action would get you killed, and she’d still die.” The solemn-eyed man turned on his heel and left.

The man looked down at the child lying on the bed. For the first time, he noticed that she was shaking. Her eyes were such a beautiful cornflower blue.

“I want my mummy and daddy,” she whispered.

He smiled at her, relieved by her absolution.

“All right, poppet.”

He raised his wand.

“Avada --”

Con sat bolt upright in bed, a scream choking his throat roughly. He scrubbed shaking hands over his face, wiping the sleep from his eyes. Dismissing his wards, he threw the covers off his legs and bolted from the four-poster. Hermione, he thought. He had to see her. The image of her sweet face was a calming influence to his racing pulse, and he felt a need to bury his mouth against her neck and sob.

The image he carried of himself had been shattered. He’d wanted to do something positive in the world; to leave something behind him that made people’s lives better. The potion with which he and Hermione were experimenting was the first step to that. But nothing, nothing he did now could make up for his monstrous act in a previous life.

The blue eyes of that little girl haunted him. Her sweet, frightened face that had begged him to make it better, and his only solution was to take her life. Bile stung the back of his throat. He needed Hermione.

He pulled on a soft grey tee shirt and a pair of shoes and raced down the boys’ dormitory steps. No one was in the common area, so Con was saved from explaining where he was going as he slipped out into the Hogwarts corridors. The Fat Lady awoke with a snort.

“I’ll not keep your secret if you lose points for your House,” she yawned.

Con made a rude gesture.

The head girl’s and boy’s room was down a floor and several corridors over. The seventh-year moved carefully, not rushing, and stopped to listen for footsteps at the junction of each hallway. By the time he reached Hermione’s room, his nerves were jangling at high alert.

“Sir Edmond,” he whispered. The man sleeping in the portrait opened his eyes.

“What’s this now?” Sir Edmond Porpington II straightened himself in his muggle wheelchair, and eyed Constantine shrewdly for all that he’d just awoken.

“Sir Edmond, I need to speak with the Head Girl. It’s quite urgent.”

The muggleborn geneticist leaned his cheek into his right hand. “If this is truly an emergency, surely it would be better to summon a teacher.”

“It’s of a personal nature, sir.”

The man in the canvas pondered the boy’s request. Sir Edmond was quite protective of the Head Girl, and he knew that Constantine Prince was important to her. Hermione and the portrait had struck up a friendship in her third year. She’d just finished reading his 1962 medical treatise, “Blood Markers in the Wizarding Population,” and had sought him out when she’d heard he’d had a portrait commissioned in the school. Their friendship had become closer as she grew up, and he’d been delighted when she’d asked to have him placed as the portrait guardian to her rooms.

“I’ll see if she’ll receive you.” The scientist rolled out of frame.

Con waited nervously, his ears straining for any sounds of someone approaching. Sir Edmond was gone for what seemed like ages, and the boy shifted his weight uncomfortably, expecting to be caught by Argus Filch or Mrs. Norris at any moment.

Finally, the man rolled back into the frame and nodded. The portrait swung open slowly and Con climbed through.

Hermione was waiting for him in the common room she shared with Blaise Zabini. The boy’s heart thumped painfully when he saw her, and he took her in his arms. His touch was as gentle and careful as if he was handling one of their water jenetts, and she sighed and rested her head on his chest.

“What’s wrong, Con?” She pulled back to look him in the face. “Did you have a memory triggererd?”

He nodded, his mouth an unhappy line. “I was dreaming and I remembered something… I remembered something so terrible that seems so inimical to my very nature I don’t know how to process it. But it wasn’t just a dream, Hermione. I feel it in my very bones that it was truth. The anguish my other self felt was like blood in water – tainting everything, leaving nothing fit to drink.”

The girl clutched her house robe more tightly around her figure. Her face was tight. “What did you remember?”

“A child’s face, her blue eyes. An act of violence that was all I could offer her. Gods, Hermione. I killed a little girl. Practically a baby. I didn’t want to, but I did it all the same.” He sat down on the floor, hard. “What happened? How am I this way? I’ll never be clean now.” Con began laughing hysterically while tears poured down his face. “Gods, how selfish do I sound? I took her life, and I’m worried about myself.” He turned horribly dead eyes on the girl standing over him and whispered, “You know the last thing I did before I took her life? I sought absolution from her. A tiny babe, barely cognizant of her own self.”

He wanted to beg Hermione to forgive him, to hold him, to fuck him senseless until he forgot the horror. Con wanted her to leave him because he was too weak to leave her, and the only thing he could give her now was broken and useless and probably evil anyway.

“Hermione,” he whispered, reaching out a hand to her.

She didn’t move.

“Hermione, please.” Con didn’t know what he was asking for, but he knew it was imperative that he receive it or he’d never move forward again. He might as well lie here on her floor, a desiccated husk of a man, because he’d never been good and never would be if his past was any indication, as if it was a prophecy of what his future held.

He looked at his hand, still hovering foolishly in the air between them, and began to pull it back as if wondering what it had been doing anyway. It had been foolish to hope that she could see him, the real Constantine Prince, and find anything of redeeming value.

“I’ll go. You don’t have to… I’ll go now.” Con clambered to his feet, an ungainly wreck of a man.

“Con,” she whispered.

“No, you’re right to rebuff me. I shouldn’t touch you again. You’re too…”

“Con,” she said, this time with more strength. Hermione reached out to touch his face. “Come upstairs with me.”

His mouth opened dumbly.

“I have no words for you. I don’t know who this man is… the man who could kill a child and call it a mercy. But I know the man who came to me tonight and collapsed on my floor in remorse. I recognize the man who wants absolution so he can move forward and become the person he wants to be. You, Constantine Prince, are a good man. Come upstairs with me and let me hold you. That’s all. Sleep in my arms tonight so I can guard your dreams.”

A tiny breath of hope blossomed in his heart, and he allowed the slender girl to pull him up the stairs to her room.

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Con’s sleep was untroubled by dreams. He was cocooned in the scent of Hermione’s apple blossom shampoo, and his head was pillowed on her breast. The relief he felt at being here, in her arms, bled into his chest so that he could once again breathe and perhaps distance himself from those gentle blue eyes, if only a little. He was drowsing, too exhausted and upset to sleep deeply, and he could feel her fingers stroking through his dark hair. He murmured and rubbed his face on her chest, and her hands skimmed down his bare back.

At 2:17 AM exactly, Constantine bolted upright as if he’d been burned.

Hermione’s eyes opened. “More dreams?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The pain was too great. It was centralized in his left wrist, directly underneath the copper cuff, and it radiated outwards like ripples in a duck’s pond. Each wave of pain was greater than the last until he was nothing but one massive burn. Con cried out, the tendons in his neck standing out in stark contrast as he gripped his wrist so tightly that his knuckles stood out white and fierce.

Falling back to the bed, he began to convulse, oblivious to the frightened girl who crouched at his side.

Pain licked at him, crossing his chest, his legs, his back, his buttocks - hot, sharp flares of agony that ate at him and then faded, only to be replaced by another pain elsewhere. It went on and on, and Con lost track of time. He was falling into an eternity of torment, and when it was finally over, and he laid panting and sweating in his love’s bed, he wasn’t sure if it had lasted minutes or days.

Hermione watched him in horror. Before her very eyes, wounds bloomed on Constantine’s chest and shoulders – red, angry lashes that faded to ropy scars curling around his body. He tossed and turned as each new scar appeared, shaking and crying out at the assault. His face was a terrible rictus of pain, his eyes clenched tightly shut and his lips pulled back to expose his crooked teeth.

It lasted just a few moments. As he lay sprawled across her bed like a wrung-out towel, Hermione dragged her hands over his torso. He was scarred. Terribly. Unthinkably. She bit her lip.

“Hermione.” His voice was raw.

She glanced up at his face and started. His black eyes were just as piercing as ever, but now she saw faint lines extending from the outer corners of his lids, a faint webbing of age that hadn’t been there before. Faint, but unmistakable lines bracketed the sides of his mouth, telling a story of unimaginable mental agony.

He looked about five years older. Constantine was undeniably still a young man, but now he appeared to be in his early twenties, and as if he’d suffered through some very hard years. Her eyes flicked to his bare chest and she grimaced. His body attested to that fact.

“Hermione, what just happened?”

She reached over to her dresser and grabbed a hand-held mirror. She held it up in front of his face and let him draw his own conclusions.

“Bugger me!” Con whispered. “I’m older than I appeared. Of all the…” He ran shaking fingers over the faint crow’s feet, and turned to look at Hermione. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea I was older than you.” She still wouldn’t look him in the eyes. “Please, forgive me. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

The girl couldn’t look at him. It was as if all of the disconnected clues they’d been examining had finally fallen into place showing her the big picture, and a suspicion that Hermione had been harboring cagily in the back of her mind bloomed into a frightening, eldritch certainty. Reaching out gentle fingers, she traced the long, ragged scar that ran like the Nile down his chest.

“It’s all right,” she said, finally meeting his eyes. “It’s all right, Con, because I love you, you see. I love you, no matter what age you are.”

She pulled him tightly to her and laid back down, a tear tracking silently from the corner of her eye. Hermione cried because in the end, she knew she’d lose him to himself.

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“Cor, mate. You look like hell!” Ron’s voice was muffled by a mouthful of toast and tea.

Con smiled without humor. “I had a bad night.” He reached out and served himself a scoop of eggs and a rasher of bacon. “As much as I’d like to enjoy breakfast, I’d prefer to enjoy my own and not yours. Please shut your mouth so no more food falls onto the table or back into the serving bowls.”

“Must have been some night! I mean, you look like you’ve aged four or five years.” Harry’s voice was enquiring.

“Nightmares,” Con said shortly.

Harry and Ron nodded, patted their friend on the back, and wisely dropped the subject.

The dark-haired man twitched, feeling someone’s eyes upon him. Scanning the Great Hall surreptitiously, he finally found the source of his discomfort. Dumbledore was watching him with an expression that, on anyone else, Con would have called dread. He scowled at the Headmaster, his expression thunderous. He knew that the old coot had something to do with this. He had far too much power over him and far too much experience at manipulation to be blameless. He determined to corner him as soon as possible.

Dozens of owls swooped into the Great Hall bringing the daily mail delivery. Hedwig, Potter’s snowy owl, dropped a bundle of letters in front of Harry.

He blushed. “Fan mail,” he said, almost ashamed.

Pigwidgeon, the Weasley’s owl, flew to Ron and dropped a copy of the Daily Prophet in his bowl of porridge. He cleaned the mess off and snapped it up to read the news.

His face suddenly went pale, and he choked on the sausage he had been swallowing. “Harry,” he said, showing him the paper.

“Oh, no! Oh, no, no, please.” Harry’s face crumpled.

Wordlessly, Ron handed Hermione the paper.

“Renowned Auror and Member of the Order of the Phoenix, Alastor Moody Killed in Line of Duty”

“Oh, poor Mad-Eye!” She scanned the contents of the article. “He was tracking down a suspected cell of Death Eaters, and when he and his team went to apprehend them, he took a stray Diffindo across the jugular. He bled out quickly, and was pronounced dead at the scene at 2:17 AM this morning.”

Her eyes widened suddenly, and she grabbed Constantine tightly on the arm. “Look,” she whispered, pointing at a recent picture of Alastor Moody.

There, on Mad-Eye's left wrist, was a copper cuff.

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A/N: So there you have it. I hope you guys liked it!

Like it, love it, hate it, review it!